


Last Time

by recryption



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, One-Sided Attraction, POV Eridan Ampora, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 18:42:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3820813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recryption/pseuds/recryption
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snapshots out of Eridan's life before, during, and after SBURB, and his experiences with a certain Karkat Vantas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Time

**Author's Note:**

> this was for the Homestuck Secret Santa 2014 - I was [creeptastically](http://www.creeptastically.tumblr.com)'s backup Santa.  
> Onesided Eridan/Karkat.  
> Personal headcanons included since we don't really know exactly what happened with the trolls during Hivebent

The first time you talk to him, he seems like a complete douchebag. He was loud and angry, hemoanonymous with gray text, and seems to care just a little too much about his caste. Granted, he was talking to you, a violet-blooded seadweller, penultimate to the top of the social ladder. If he was a lowblood like the ghost girl, then it would make slight sense for him to mask his color, if merely to make you think that he was higher than he really was.

You wonder where your kismesis even met the guy. He said that FLARPing was stupid and that you were stupid for doing it with the spiderbitch, out of everyone he knew. It was obvious that they platonically hated each other.

His name is Karkat Vantas, hemoanonymous angry troll. He leaves after a few minutes, saying that he couldn’t stand the disgusting frothing nonsense coming out of the vile sack of shit that you call your thinkpan.

* * *

The second time you talk to him, it’s right after you have hunted lusii for your moirail, and you are tired and covered in blood from when you had gotten just a little bit too close to the lusus when it exploded. It’s a dirty and ugly olive-green blood. You’re not sure whose lusus it was, only that it wasn’t the one of the other girl who would occasionally roleplay with your kismesis.

The girl was too happy for your tastes, and you were too much of a dick to her, apparently. She had closed the chatlog after a few sentences.

This time, the hemoanonymous gray troll asks you for your name. He says that since the last gut-wrenching time you had talked to him, he had remembered that you had never given him your name.

You say that you are Eridan Ampora, self-made Orphaner for Her Imperious Condescension, or at least, the to-be one. He doesn’t seem impressed, and flat-out states that you’re lying, at first. You tell him that you are so extremely fucking tired that he’s lucky you doesn’t call on an imperial drone to cull him and his lusus right then and there.

The conversation lasts a few sentences longer, this time. He talks about a new game that his acquaintance – Sollux Captor, a mustard-blood with an affinity for coding and psionic powers – had coded, and asks if you wanted to play. He gives you Sollux’s trolltag – twinArmageddons, which obviously doesn’t make much sense to you.

You tell him bye before he does, and he doesn’t have a chance to respond before you’ve closed the tab and opened a new chat with the mustard-blood.

* * *

The third time you talk to him, the first thing he asks you is what team you’re on. He boasts that he’s the leader of the red team, having taken the title from the teal-blood Terezi Pyrope. You say that you’re on the blue team, and exchange a few more words before he says that he better stop talking, his lusus is coming.

You tell him that the game is supposed to be really intense, and that if he was a fragile lowblood he shouldn’t actually play. He laughs at you (really, laughs through chat by typing HA. HAHAHA. multiple times) derisively, tells you “AS IF,” and leaves.

* * *

The hemoanonymous troll talks to you more – a lot more, and it’s nice to be noticed for once as more than the caped fishdick.

* * *

The first time you (try to) talk to him in the game, you’re trying to ask him where you went wrong with Feferi. She seemed to hate you by the end of your last conversation with her, and broke off the moirallegiance. He doesn’t answer, and you can’t tell what’s happening from behind the screen. 

The next closest thing you can get is the purple-blooded asshole. He tells you that Karkat just watched Sollux die, since he couldn’t get him into the game fast enough.

You feel like an asshole. A really, really terrible person. He tells you to calm down, and to slam a bottle of that horrible soda he seems to be infatuated with. You do it, but there’s really no point. It’s just soda.

* * *

The second time you try to talk to him, he answers. But it’s in the middle of a huge memo, and he just bans you, telling you to talk to him in private and air your concerns. You watch Vriska and Tavros intrude and talk to each other, Karkat helping them along with their red-black quadrant vacillation, and a pang of jealousy runs through your chest.

* * *

The third time you pester him, he answers your questions at last. You tell him everything about your former moirail and what you did and what she did. He tells you that you’re an asshole for trying to push your red affections onto your moirail, and also says that she’s a douche for breaking it off right after you confessed, no matter how much of a shitsack you were to her before.

You feel that he’s just saying some of it was Feferi’s fault to make you feel better.

He invites you over to his land, which he calls LOPAH. The Land of Pulse and Haze. He says that everything is a super bright, searing red which will burn your ocular globes from the inside out. You say that you’ll probably come around soon, but first you have to kill these angels.

You can hear him snarking you from behind the screen, but you close the log and shoot a beam out of Ahab’s Crosshairs right before the angel’s talons dig into your back.

* * *

Before you meet, you talk much more. He tells you that you’re a douche a lot of the time, and you say the same thing to him back. It’s more affectionate than with any real hate. He speaks to you as a friend, something that you haven’t had in a long time.

You like it. You think you like it, at least.

* * *

The first time you see Vantas, he’s bleeding heavily out of a gash on his arm, with enemies surrounding him. You don’t think, you just shoot at them. An instinctive action. The ogres and imps take a while to clear out, simply because there are so many of them.

He’s panting, and you realize that _his_ blood is a bright, searing red, like the land around him. His eyes are open wide, and he seems about to abscond.

You open your mouth, close it, and open it again, making a comment about how you didn’t know that he wore eyeliner.

His facial expression thanks you, but he snaps back at you, before quietly (at least, as quiet as he could get) asking if the dark circles were really that bad. You tell him no, before dragging him back to his vandalized hive to patch him up.

* * *

The first time Karkat trades weapons with you just so you two can see how they work, you nearly cut off a lock of his hair, and he nearly destroys your hive.

There is a silent agreement that the trade would never happen again as you switch back. You invite him to LOWAA, the Land of Wrath and Angels, or your land. You warn him about what he might see there.

He dismisses your concerns with a scowl and a few snapped words, or what is really a laugh and a smile for him. He says he’ll be there later, and then scurries off to hop through his portal and go back to his hive for supplies and an alchemiter.

You smile oddly for the rest of the day, but you can’t figure out why.

* * *

The first time Kar visits your land, he immediately remarks on how quiet it is. He talks about the white cathedrals and pillars spiraling up into the air and the dropped feathers of angels on the ground.

You take him back to your hive, and he makes a shitty joke about how you two had just met. You grin at it, but your purple blood rushes to your face. You’re not sure why.

* * *

The second time Kar comes over, he’s nearly massacred by a swarm of angels. You manage to fight them off, but there’s definitely more than a few gashes oozing blood from his body.

He still stares at you, as if waiting for disapproval. You sigh and try not to smile as he leans on you all the way back to your hive, and you get him cleaned up.

He makes a remark about how you have a few cuts as well, but you barely feel it, and wave it off as nothing.

The next morning, you really regret not getting those cleaned out and cared for.

* * *

He comes over more often now, sometimes carting along a few friends.

* * *

The first time you see the Black King, you are with Kar. Vriska is smiling in an expression of pure glee, but to be honest, you’re fucking terrified. Kar looks determined, but you’ve spent long enough around him to tell that he’s scared as well.

* * *

The first time you see Kar in the fight, he is covered in red bloodstains and is decimating the tentacles surrounding him with his scythe. He leaves his mark – a thick gash across the Black King’s chest – before he’s wiped off with a shake of the King’s claw.

You don’t know why, but you stop what you’re doing and aim a blast at the Dersian ships and pawns and tentacles surrounding him.

He would be okay, for a while.

* * *

The first time you damage the Black King – any significant damage, at least – you shoot a hole through his wing. He’s bleeding red blood and there is so much blood _everywhere_.

You realize that it looks like Kar’s blood, but quickly shake the thought out of your head. You have to stay focused.

The memory of the second time you talked to him comes back, when you were tired and covered in olive-green blood. It makes you smirk, if only for a split-second, before Feferi calls on you and you return to blasting away ships and tentacles and monsters with Ahab’s Crosshairs.

* * *

The first time you retreat, there is a bolt of red and blue psionics directed straight to the lilypad you and Kar are standing on. You run, but he doesn’t, seemingly frozen. An Aradiabot sacrifices herself to push him away, and you’re grateful for that.

So many Aradiabots have fallen. That one wouldn’t be a great loss.

* * *

The first time you win – and to be honest, the only time you would – Kar seems stunned. You are stunned. You’re reasonably sure that everybody else is stunned, except maybe Vriska. She’s still standing there with a huge grin on her face.

He’s staring at the small blue orb of Skaia that would be your – no, you correct yourself, _our_ – prize. A new universe. He looks so small, covered in red blood, asteroids floating in the space around him, bathed in the blue light of a new Skaia.

You realize why you smile when he’s around you.

* * *

The first time the first thought of losing comes into your mind, one of the angels appears in front of you. It’s not an angel, though. It’s a being crackling with uranium sparks and with a sword pierced through its chest, suffering no pain.

An Aradiabot wastes no time shoving you and the others into the portal, and your world is enveloped in a blindingly white light. You wonder if you’re dead. You wonder if Kar is alive.

You’re going to wish for death if Kar is dead and you aren’t.

* * *

The first time you truly wake up, you’re in a room. The room is filled with the limp, unconscious bodies of your other friends. Kar is there, and you can see him breathing.

You’re so tired. The sounds of humming electronics and crackling wires soothe you. Your arms and legs and body go limp, and you go to sleep.

You wake up on a planet shrouded in purple, violet cathedrals spiraling up into the air.

* * *

The first time you see Kar in the strange new world, he’s messing around with the ectobiology equipment. The meteor was large, the lab you were in sprawling. You had transportalizer pads that led to your own private rooms, a room absolutely filled with computers, various monsters preserved in tubes, and other things only Skaia could’ve dreamed of.

He seems extremely angry as he fiddles around with the wires. You pop up behind him and nudge him a few times before he acknowledges you, throwing the cables up in the air and snapping out a _what do you want._

Kar slumps down and apologizes, saying that he was tired and that there were no recuperacoons anywhere, so he had to just endure his nightmares. He wasn’t getting much sleep, and the eyeliner you had joked about the first time you saw him seems especially prominent.

You don’t know what to do, especially since you aren’t getting any sleep yourself.

* * *

The first time you talk to one of the humans, you get absolutely exasperated with her. It doesn’t help that you’re tired. You’ve learned to sleep through what nightmares you have and dream the nights away on the violet city of Derse.

She blows up your computer after you ask for a kismessitude with her.

* * *

The first time you ask Kar for relationship advice while on the meteor, you’re obviously coming at a wrong time. He is raging and slamming away at the keys on the keyboard, talking to the human he had wanted to.

He gives up, giving a final slam of the keyboard, a few rapid clicks of the mouse, before the computer is shut down and he rolls back his chair into you. He seems surprised, but not really, that it’s you.

Kar asks you what the fuck you want. You say that it’s nothing, and that you’ll come back later.

You travel into the bowels of the meteor and wonder why you can’t talk around him, before you realize. You make the exact same realization you had when Kar was about to claim the prize, except this time you can’t deny it.

* * *

You talk less with Kar. He seems a bit less stable, a bit more moody. The moments you can spend with him are the best of your life.

* * *

The first time you think about turning tail and running for the beast that ended your chances of living as a god of a new universe, it seems ridiculous. You would never team up with that monster that ruined every good thing in your life. The thing that made Kar so distant from the others.

* * *

The second time you think about joining the demon – Jack Noir – it doesn’t seem so implausible. He would be a sure sign of safety. You would be abandoning the others to their fate, maybe even _killing_ -

You stop your train of thought in its tracks. You wouldn’t kill Karkat Vantas. You wouldn’t kill the only person who treated you as a person and not as a complete tool.

You wouldn’t kill the person who made you stop talking just to listen to him. Kill the person who listened to you bitch about your relationships. Kill the person who actually knew who you were.

* * *

The third time you think about joining Jack Noir, you ask Feferi if she wanted to come with you. If she wanted to save her life.

She says that you’re crazy for even considering it. What are you trying to accomplish? You don’t even know if he’ll take you in. He’ll probably just kill you.

* * *

The first time you get angry, _truly_ angry, not just the faux anger put up for show or displays of kismessitude, you kill a person. It was the mustard-blood, and the dull gold blood is spattered over the wall.

You see Kar out of the corner of your eye, and he seems too stunned to acknowledge what you did, or that it was you who did it. You desperately hope that he never realizes that it was you, even though you know that it’s too late.

* * *

The last time you see Karkat, you are standing with blood figuratively on your hands. The was-going-to-be-but-now-no-longer-is Imperial Condescension is lying on the horn pile, fuchsia blood surrounding her in a pool. Sollux Captor is slumped against the wall on a computer desk, still oozing mustard-yellow blood. Kanaya Maryam, master of the ashen quadrant, has a hole through her stomach bleeding jade-green blood.

You stare at Kar for a long while – or at least, what seems to you like a long while. You try to memorize his face, every individual feature.

You know that you won’t be coming back, and even if you do, it wouldn’t be the same. He is absolutely stunned, frozen, and you think of how easy it would be to kill him right then and there and spare both of you the pain.

You hold up your gun, but stop. You can’t do it.

Before he can say anything, you’ve already absconded, running through the hallways out of the bloodstained room.

* * *

The last time you think of Karkat Vantas, you’re already lying in a pool of your own blood. There are a few precious moments of consciousness, you know there are, of excruciating pain. You thought you had killed Maryam, but you hadn’t. She had come back as a rainbow drinker, glowing bright white and with anger written over her facial expression.

She had sliced you in half, and now, all you can feel is _pain_.

You know that Kar wouldn’t have saved you. You know that he hadn’t shared your feelings, and even if he did, you would never know, now.

* * *

The last time you think of Karkat Vantas, hemoanonymous mutant-blooded troll, the flush crush you had harbored for sweeps (You think sweeps; you don’t know if it had started from the first time you met him, but it probably did), the douche you had wanted to hold in your arms and pity over and over and over again for sweeps onwards, the troll that treated you as a _person_ -

You know it’s too late.


End file.
